This is an untimely post. I’d forgotten I’d taken this pictureâ€”just found it on my wife’s hard drive, by accident. But it was fairly pretty so I decided I’d put it up. The melons are from a volunteer vine that grew up in a blasted piece of last year’s garden without any help from me. There was a drought and the leaves were tiny and tough, and then it had tiny fruit to match, and then frost came and the leaves died and I figured I’d open the damn things up and here they are. As you can tell from the seeds, they weren’t fully ripe. Not much to speak of, but they were eatable enough.

This reminds me of a meal I had about the time this picture was taken, where was served asparagus. I was surprised to see how surprised I was to be served asparagus in late fall. It was bitter.

I heard something on the radio the other day to remind me of Elliot Coleman’s latest four-season gardening book, with his talk of candy carrots, and spinach. The man on the radio was talking about how the cold, or the lack of heat, rather, is necessary to growing first rate vegetables like theseâ€”how we should, therefor, grow them, and eat them, in preference to imported, necessarily inferior examples. This makes good sense to me, and I am dying now to have a greenhouse, as well as an orchard, if only I had a place to put them.

I’ve also been thinking some about container culture of food plants. Currently, I keep rosemary that way, because it’s a non-hardy perennial, and necessary, and that is a good start. On the same theme, I plan to supplement that with bay. Container grown bay is a thing that might make a pleasant tiny supplement to a farmers’ market income, I notice. I considered coffee and black pepper, but these things are relatively cheap and used in large quantities and wouldn’t seem to justify the labor. Vanilla? Lemons? I’ve also been thinking about companion planting in containers, by way of a green mulch. I made a number of houseplant mulch experiments this last year and none with impressive results, but the train of thought did eventually lead to the possibility of doubling upâ€”marjoram beneath my rose, or something. I suspect I’ll be keeping my readership posted.